The idea for the 10th Edition of The ROM Report came to me when I was talking to a couple of my colleagues about 80s cartoon series. I remember being glued to the tube and being fed a diet of Thundercats, Transformers, Centurions, and Spiral Zone.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also a favourite series of mine. I wouldn’t really call them turtles, they are more like tortoises but like blondes, turtles seem to be more fun. The cartoon came out in 1987 and the NES game was release in 1989.

It’s pretty fun to play, as you can see in the video I’ve taken earlier of the game.

On the otherhand, I didn’t really watch Beetlejuice on TV. However, the video game, released for the NES is a little tough and presents a challenge. See for yourselves:

Now, if you think difficulty levels are over-rated, you have not seen Transformers: Convoy No Nazo. Yup, it’s based on the Transformers cartoon series and stars Ultra Magnus.

The game is so tough that I can’t even get pass the first level. Here’s a video of my attempt:

All 80s inspired games featured in this article can be run on the Nintendo DS with the use of nesDS. Check out the rest of The ROM Report for more information on how to run older generation games on the Nintendo DS.

NES gamers would probably remember Taito’s classic The Legend of Kage which was released in 1987 for the North American NES.

The game was a 2D platformer and even though I’ve played it as a kid, I remembered distinctively that the hero was a ninja that could jump really high, and one of the enemy types wore a hat and shot flames, and was a tough bastard at that.

Anyways, I got the game to run on the Nintendo DS with the help of the nesDS emulator. You might want to check that out, but before that here’s a video of the game running on the DS.

Since the theme of this edition of The ROM Report is “the old and the new”, lets talk about the sequel to The Legend of Kage. Yup, Kage Densetsu: The Legend of Kage 2 was released in early March 2008 for the Nintendo DS.

The graphics have become much prettier, and along with it, more forgiving gameplay and a rather nice soundtrack as well. The hero, Kage, can still jump really high and comes with a new special power that allows him to duplicate himself.

This article could have been titled “How to Add Cheat Codes to Your R4DS?” as what am I about to describe to you is essentially that, but hey, I figured the title is eye-catching, so do bear with it :).

Produced by Taito to go along with its release of Arkanoid DS, the Paddle Controller does seem a little limited in application. However, did you know that you can actually play Mario Kart DS using the same Paddle Controller?

It does require some “cheating” on your part since the Paddle Controller is not officially supported by the game, having been released some two years before this odd-looking controller hit the market. Support for the Paddle Controller can be implemented by means of Action Replay or any flashcart with a built-in cheat function.

Since I don’t have an Action Replay, here’s a guide on how to add Paddle Controller support for your Mario Kart DS on the R4DS.

Once you have downloaded the R4 Cheat Code Editor, remember to uncompress it to somewhere easily accessible. You’ll be using the Cheat Code Editor for most part of the guide.

Start the Cheat Editor by clicking on the r4cce.exe file.

Once in, select File -> Open

Look for the CHEAT.DAT file located in the _system_ folder of your R4DS MicroSD card, and click on the Open button

This will cause all the Cheat Codes stored in the CHEAT.DAT file to be listed out, by game, on the left pane. Look for Mario Kart DS.

Click on the Add Code button in order to enter one of the two cheat strings to enable Paddle Controller support for Mario Kart DS.
Enter the following information (obtained from prerequisite 1.) in the corresponding text boxes:

Once this is done, it’s time to save the changes that you have done to the CHEAT.DAT file. Click on File->Save to do so.

Now, replace the MicroSD card back into the R4DS flashcart. Before starting the Mario Kart DS ROM on the R4DS, be sure to enable the cheat codes by visiting the Cheat Menu via highlighting the ROM and pressing Y.

Once the game is started, press the Start and Select buttons simultaneously. After that, pressing left or right on the direction pad will calibrate the Paddle Controller’s centre point to its present position.

Use the Paddle Controller to move left or right (but not up and down) when it comes to menu options and during the race. Be warned though that the Paddle Controller can be quite sensitive, which would lead to some over-steering action :).

Here’s a video of me playing MKDS with the Paddle Controller:

The Paddle Controller for the Nintendo DS is available at Play-Asia with the price tag of USD 19.90. Lets just hope that other developers would take advantage of this new controller in order to justify the price tag.

A big shout out to Pizza Pasta (The New New Era) for a very helpful tip on getting Earthbound Zero to run on the nesDS. I’m quoting his comment verbatim:

You might know this by now but Earthbound Zero is totally playable in NESDS, you just have to mess with it a little on your computer.

All you have to do is open Earthbound Zero in a NES emulator on your computer (I used Nestopia) and get to a point where you can save a file. After you save, transfer the Earthbound Zero SAV file into your NESDS roms folder and you should be able to resume your game in NESDS. Hope this helps.

Welcome back to The Rom Report, currently in Issue Eight. Here’s where you’ll find what retro games from the NES, SNES, Genesis, and Gameboy eras will work on a modern day device such as the Nintendo DS with the help of homebrew emulator software!

I came across this back-issue of Retro Gamer at a local magazine shop and I bought it for just RM 10 (3 USD). It is a pretty good read, better than some of the retro games websites that I usually visit online.

As such, this issue of The ROM Report is inspired by that magazine issue which featured the NES on the cover. Later on, you’ll find a substantial number of NES games featured on this edition of The Rom Report.

As usual, I’m using the R4DS Slot-1 solution to run a variety of emulators required to run all these retro games on the Nintendo DS. The emulators are:

SNEmulDS – For SNES Games

nesDS – For NES Games

Lameboy – For GameBoy Color Games

jEnesisDS – For Sega Genesis Games

For a full list of emulators, please refer to The Rom Report Part VI. Before I get on with the results, I’ll need to re-iterate that emulators are not perfect, therefore even if a game might seem to run excellently on an emulator, I’ll say that the game “runs okay“.

On the other hand, “not okay” is a catch-all phrase for games that cannot run on the emulator or are unplayable due to major glitches.

With that out of the way, here are the games that I’ve tried out:

Adventures of Lolo (NES) – Runs OK. This is a puzzle game in the vein of Bomberman. You play as a rotund purple creature in a quest to rescue his princess (Lala). Curiously, Lolo and Lala appear as the bad guys in some Kirby games. Both games are developed by HAL Laboratory Inc.

Balloon Fight (NES) - Runs OK. For all you retro gamers out there, this is a classic on the NES, along with Excitebike and Ice Climber.

Crystalis (Gameboy Color) – Runs OK. SNKs Zelda killer does in fact play a bit like the Zelda of old, but in a sci-fi setting.

Crystalis (NES) – Runs OK. This is the same game which was ported to the Gameboy Color.

Dragon’s Lair (SNES) – Runs OK. Another platform hack and slash and like Rastan Saga II, I really like the graphics.

Earthbound Zero (NES) – Not OK. This is a major disappointment as I couldn’t get the Demiforce version of Earthbound Zero, which is the English version of Mother 1, to run on nesDS. Here’s a tip I got from someone: All you have to do is open Earthbound Zero in a NES emulator on your computer (I used Nestopia) and get to a point where you can save a file. After you save, transfer the Earthbound Zero SAV file into your NESDS roms folder and you should be able to resume your game in NESDS. Hope this helps.

Frogger (SNES) – Runs OK. I’m actually pleasantly surprised at what pretty graphics the SNES is capable of, and Frogger is a good example. Played on a smaller screen like that of the DS serves to accentuate the graphics even more.

Ikari Warrios (NES) – Runs OK. SNK’s offering on the NES feels like a pushover in the starting 30 seconds but quickly ramps up the difficulty. Apparently the game was inspired by Rambo.

Maniac Mansion (NES) – Runs OK. Lucasfilm Games’ (now LucasArts) “point and click” adventure game was heavily censored when ported over to the NES to conform to Nintendo’s policy. For a list of what was left-out, read the Expurgation of Maniac Mansion. As for the “point and click” part, you use the d-pad to move a cursor on the screen.

Popeye (NES) – Runs OK. An arcade conversion for the NES, it’s pretty fun to play on the DS. I used to play this alot on the NES clone called Micro Genius.

Rastan Saga II (Genesis) – Runs OK. A platform hack and slash, I actually liked this game, with its colourful pallete and rather fun gameplay. Best played on jEnesisDS and not PicoDriveDS.

River City Ransom (NES) – Runs OK. A platform bash-em-up, I like the fact that you can throw weapons (chains, knuckle dusters) at opponents. The graphics remind of me of South Park.

Startropics (NES) – Runs OK. Nothing much on this as I’m still adverse to RPGs with really crappy graphics or boring premise.

Sweet Home (NES) - Runs OK. Feel’s abit like Resident Evil with a haunted castle/mansion and a bunch of people looking for something.

Wrecking Crew (NES) – Not OK.

Some of these retro games are available for purchase in their original or updated forms.

As some of you might notice from my previous The ROM Report installments, I experiment with quite a number of emulators (SNemulDS, jEnesisDS, Lameboy) and also quite a number of old-school ROMs on my Nintendo DS.

To keep track on what works, what doesn’t and ultimately what have I tried out, I decided to create a spreadsheet in Excel.

It’s a relatively simple one and soon you, dear reader, will be able to download it.

I really liked the “Notable Homebrew” section in the Nintendo DS Homebrew Wikipedia article before it was editted out, with the reason that “Wikipedia is not a list of links”.

In any case, the list of links from that section can still be retrieved from the revision history.

I’m putting up a portion here for posterity. More specifically, it’s a list of emulators.

I’ve taken the liberty to enhance this list of emulators that run on the Nintendo DS. Included now are the manufacturers of the consoles as well as the year that they were introduced. The format is as such Manufacturer ConsoleName Year : EmulatorName.

Emulators that I’ve tried before have an asterix (*) next to their names. Feel free to click on the links to find out more about the consoles and also to download the emulators:

I’ve been trying out StellaDS, an emulator for the Atari 2600, and I can’t believe how ugly Mario Bros looked liked 30 years ago. Anyways, it’s all very nice getting to play really old games on the DS.

Be warned though that emulators are not perfect, the ones that ‘m using have compatibility problems with some games on their respective platforms. Those games either look terribly jumbled up or refuse to run on the emulator.

In this Fifth edition of The Rom Report, we’ll look at running something special on the Nintendo DS, with an exceptionally good looking piece of homebrew software and a bunch of ROMs as well.

According to Wikipedia, MAME, which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software.

In plain English it would mean that old arcade games can be played on MAME emulator running on a PC!

All you need to do is to supply the ROM image of the arcade game, by which downloading them is a legal gray area, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Legalities aside, the same thing (running arcade games using a MAME emulator) can be done with the Nintendo DS! The piece of software that I’m about to introduce may just support a paltry sum of 75 games, but it really is a piece of work.

For starters, MarcaDS looks like a piece of commercial software, with the nice intro screen and all. It even apparently supports the use of the Rumble Pak, but the best part is yet to come. It uses BOTH DS screens to display a game! It’s something like playing games from this year’s Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits for the Nintendo DS.

Running MarcaDS is pretty easy. Just copy the MarcaDS.nds file to the root directory of your Flash Cart’s Trans Flash memory card (Most of the time, it’s a MicroSD card). If your Flash Cart’s firmware doesn’t support auto DLDI patching, it would be a good thing to apply the DLDI patch to the MarcaDS.nds file before attempting to run it.

I’ve always recommended creating a folder (let’s call it MAME) in the Trans Flash memory card, to store games of a specific type. It’s a much better way of organizing than just dumping everything in the root directory. Arcade ROMS are stored as ZIP files and you’ll have to make sure that the zip file names match the ones listed in the compatibility list.

Here’s the entire compatibility list taken from the MarcaDS site. The rest of the site is in French, but you can visit it here.

In order to download MarcaDS, scroll right down to the bottom of the page, with the latest version being the first on the list of files. Click here for a direct download, but it’s best to check back with the previous link provided, for latest updates.

I seem to have more fun playing retro games on the Nintendo DS than my bunch of DS games. The Encyclopedia of Game.Machines has been a great read, full of retro stuff (Play-Asia, USD 29.90)

Normally when it comes to running Gameboy and Gameboy Color on the Nintendo DS, the homebrew programs of choice to run those ROMs would be Goomba and Goomba Color.

However, those progams utilise a .gba extension that would require a Slot-2 solution such as a Supercard to run.

I’ve found a great way for playing GameBoy Color games on the R4DS, or practically any Slot-1 solution such as the M3 and it’s called Lameboy. Downloadable via GBATemp, Lameboy is currently in version 0.9 and it’s pretty easy to run.

Provided that your R4’s firmware is the latest, you would not need to manually apply the DLDI patch on to the Lameboy ROM before running it. The latest R4 firmware will perform an automatic DLDI patch.

So, here are the games that I tried:

Super Mario Bros. DX: Runs like a charm, with very minimal slowdowns. All Mario goodness in 56 colours.

Street Fighter Alpha: With just two fire buttons, fighthing is made easier. Just nice for 2D fighthing n00bs like me.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening: Runs pretty fine.

Metal Gear Solid: Like Link’s Awakening, it runs fine too.

Wacky Races: Framerate problems abound, not recommended unless you have a wish for epilepsy

Here’s a tip while running GBC games on Lameboy, press the “Y” button to expand the game’s display to almost the entire top screen of the Nintendo DS.